


yellow paint

by missmeparadox



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/F, Falling In Love, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Poetry, Secret Admirer
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 14:30:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11465547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmeparadox/pseuds/missmeparadox
Summary: annabeth chase cannot write poetry to save her life. piper mcclean can't seem to do much else. from this, sunflowers may grow.a love story founded on the powers of haikus, metaphors, friendship, and girls falling in love.





	1. athena

**Author's Note:**

> and so i return to pjo once again! this is going to be a part not fic, part labor of love for one of my favorite ships because i apparently didn't have enough going on. updates will come sporadically since i am going through a million and a half doctors and still trying to update everything else. comments are of course always appreciated!

sometime between the yawning hours of eleven and noon, annabeth headache bleeds into a molten pain that consumes the expanse of her forehead. lunch passes quickly in the nurse's office, and she's already coordinated finding substitutes for her two after school meetings so she may go home and sleep by the time her fifth period english class begins with a harsh ringing of bells.

it's not quite fair to say that annabeth doesn't like english; she enjoys the stories they read, and the teacher is fair and quick witted enough to make the class enjoyable.

but annabeth cannot write poetry.

writing never came as easily to her as reading had. sure, she had her own ideas, but those were best expressed in blueprints, or spreadsheets, not on neat lines like the sample verses they were given each week. her poems were adequate at best; neat, rigid sets of words adhering strictly to the rubric, nothing more and nothing ever less.

she wouldn't need to read or write a poem ever again when she went to college to become an architect, anyhow.

as class begins, a barreling figure enters the room in a swirl of a trailing dress and long hair the color of chestnuts, a lankier form in a long jacket following close behind. piper and percy, rarely apart and always seemingly running from something, laughed at the production and separated, with piper breezily settling in the chair across from annabeth.

confoundingly enough, piper could write poetry.

annabeth had seen her do it for days now as the lesson had progressed. her pieces would often stray from the standards of the rubric, but there was an undeniable melody to her work that had, admittedly, been the cause of some envy for some of her classmates, annabeth included.

this didn't mean she held any ill will for piper whatsoever; in fact, if piper and percy's disaffection with their english class was any indication, annabeth was almost positive they would all get along fairly well. she did cringe at some of their actions, but always from a place of sympathy. piper's confidence and percy's amicable nature were admirable, but the pair could be, for lack of better phrasing, fairly fucking obnoxious.

the class bursts into laughter suddenly. miss kim cannot figure out how to shrink the window on her laptop. annabeth finds herself smiling, despite totally sympathizing due to the fact that high schoolers are Terrible, when she notices the note.

a double-folded green post-it note seems to almost cheerily peer up at her from her open notebook where she had been doodling mindlessly. upon further inspection, there's a sort of code scrawled inside, rows of boxes and other sharp shapes in the place of words.

annabeth furrows her brow like her father does when faced with a particularly difficult sudoku puzzle. a perfunctory glance around the classroom reveals that everyone has lost interest in miss kim's blunder and has returned to fishing out their homework. piper, percy, and another boy named frank have begun playing a game of hangman.

* * *

the code is called pigpen cipher, annabeth learns after some google searches and an after school snack. she's nearly got the first part of the alphabet memorized when she remembers to translate the note itself.

"steel-eyed beauty, her/  
face echoes another age/  
of gilded idols"


	2. nike

piper mcclean could very sincerely testify to the fact that she did not (definitely, absolutely) make an effort to be late to class more than absolutely necessary.

her teachers would probably (definitely, absolutely) argue the opposite. she wasn't the best student to start with, after years of remedial classes, tutors, guidance counselors delicately requesting to see her journal just for a page or two only to be met with the SNAP of her closing the cover and hightailing it out of there. all of the accommodations in the world couldn't change the minds of some people. math was hell, chemistry near-impossible.

but english class, that was where she belonged.

maybe not so much as french, where she most likely actually belonged, but english. sure, their english class was too crowded, and the teacher smelled like mothballs when you got too close to her desk, but it was almost worth it for the literature unit.

and, for annabeth.

to quote one percy jackson directly, annabeth strongly resembled the union of an olympic sprinter and every teacher he had ever had a crush on. piper wasn't quite sure what to make of this description, but latched on to the phrase "olympic". annabeth had the face that she had seen so often in her art textbooks; strong jawed and soft browed, with eyes that could level earth.

piper, being piper, writes a poem for the class warm up and one for her own collection, safe and sound on a green scrap of paper beneath her binder.

"give it to her," percy whispers from behind his textbook.

and for a moment of clouded judgement and a rosy disposition, she considers the thought. striding over to annabeth's desk, looking her in the eye and proclaiming how her face makes piper feel like she's swallowed a sunrise.

in that moment of hesitation, leo reaches over with one gangly tree limb arm, and snatches the note from the safety of piper's fingers.

"mother FUCKER."

her eyes narrow as she spins to catch him, fingers stretching like talons. leo evades her and winks as he weaves expertly between desks, beelining for the far cluster near the door with alarming speed. percy grabs the back of her pants, and piper knows she's lost this battle, but it doesn't quell the sudden wave of desperation that she feels as she watches the note pass innocently, unnoticed from leo's hand to annabeth's desk.

the little green square sits like a lost bird for a few moments before annabeth's absentmindedly tucks it into her pencil case without further examination. percy's breath whistles through his teeth over piper's shoulder.

when leo returns, she socks him in the arm and opens her mouth for a lecture, but he cuts her off.

"she can't read it anyway, dude," he smiles with his sammy davis smile and rubs her knuckles out of a fist, "so save the punches for a bag."

"i hate you," piper hisses as their fossil of a teacher calls the class to order.

"get in line," leo replies sweetly, "and don't forget to try english next time."

piper eyes her morning's notes, all written in neat lines of coded script. percy giggles over her shoulder, and she shoots him an empty glare before joining him and frank zhang in drifting further and further from the rest of the class.

the note goes forgotten, for now.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> feedback always appreciated! let me know what you think of contrasting the writing styles, i'm trying to keep it up for something bigger later.


	3. echo

annabeth's hair is pinned tightly to her scalp, and it's about the only secure quality of her being she's aware of at the moment.

it's late, and she should be finishing her math homework. she should be showering and brushing the clips from her hair and maybe having a brief meltdown under the spray of warm water about how she's still close to a D in english. she should be doing so many things, but they hardly seem to matter.

two of the little green paper envelopes sat before her, the clear objects of her direct focus. her textbooks had been cast aside like a toppled house of cards. she could attend to geometry later.

the second note had arrived a day after the first. during a fire drill, annabeth had been forced to leave her backpack behind to stand on the muddy baseball field and feel sweat bead on her upper lip for nine minutes. when she returned, the scrap of paper seemed to greet her cheerily from where it had been tucked into her bag. with the note came another poem.

_i ask the new sun/_  
tell me of the universe/  
"it hurts to become"

it's different from the first only in that annabeth's cannot possibly see how this could be about her. she chided herself internally for days after the delivery of the first note, blushing to her ears at the idea that there could be something ancient in her strong jaw or heavy eyebrows.

this is a love poem, she knows, but it's not a nice one. 

the simplicity and utter heavy-hearted resignation of the short lines linger in annabeth's mind for the rest of the evening. she spends dinner with her father in a comfortable silence as she ponders what someone must have had to see to convey something so well.

she does have her moment of panic in the shower; a bright, hot well of energy that feels like a starburst behind her eyes. struck with the sudden loneliness that accompanies such long nights (and her father is asleep, their house a silent echo chamber), she grabs a pen and a page from a yellow legal pad and writes, in careful code, a poem.

the note is folded into her backpack. she packs away her textbooks, too tired to think.

that night, she dreams of a thousand green paper cranes, soaring above her head in a never ending cloud.

 

 


	4. aphrodite

piper mclean is a lot of things.

 

she is calm under pressure. she dresses like some divorced dad marooned in a consignment store. she’s an incredible swimmer, regardless of what percy may think.

 

however, piper mclean is anything but oblivious. she could pick annabeth chase’s handwriting out of a lineup any day.

 

_what a pretty thing/_

_two green birds sharing a desk/_

_how lucky am i?_

 

“do you think she knows it’s you?” percy asks from over her left shoulder as they furiously brainstorm over the offending note, lunches pushed aside. the slip of yellow paper had poked from between a fat stack of math worksheets piper was tasked with grading during her internship period, stapled neatly to annabeths completed homework. the idea of coincidence had hardly crossed pipers mind because, quite honestly, why should it?

 

if there was anyone else leaving annabeth coded love poems, she’d have another problem altogether to worry about.

 

“do you?” piper asked in response. the two attempted to nonchalantly survey the cafeteria, where annabeth seemed to be absent. leo crashed into the table with hazel, cutting into their line of sight and dragging the two into some apparent debate he had started in his world history class. investigation would have to wait.

 

 


End file.
